Stiles an intelligence officer during Cold War

Updated 8:21 pm, Thursday, February 28, 2013

In East Germany, Charles Stiles' “servants were KGB; the chandelier was bugged.”

In East Germany, Charles Stiles' “servants were KGB; the chandelier was bugged.”

Stiles an intelligence officer during Cold War

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As a college student, Charles Sidney Stiles needed to fill up his course schedule at Colorado A&M, so he took Russian; it was the only class that fit. That choice led him to a two-decade career as a military intelligence officer that enabled his family to live in such places as Turkey, Japan and East Germany during the Cold War.

Stiles died Feb. 18 at age 83.

After graduating from college, Stiles joined the Air Force. It was 1952 and the Korean War was in full swing, so when he was offered a choice of continuing his study of Russian at Syracuse University or being sent to Korea, he went to graduate school, wife Jane Stiles said.

Charles Stiles was raised on a farm in Canon City, Colo., a place that brother-in-law David Whitlock described as “kind of in the boondocks.”

“He had a certain Colorado accent that was part of his speech,” Whitlock said. “He was in the immersion program for a year at Syracuse; he came out ... understood the culture, read and wrote Russian fluently.”

He met his wife while stationed in Japan, where she was an American Red Cross social worker at military hospitals. The two were introduced by mutual friends.

After marrying in California, they moved to Okinawa, spent a few years in San Antonio and then lived in Germany and Turkey. In the early 1970s, Stiles got the chance to work in Potsdam, East Germany, as liaison to the Soviet commander there, his wife said. “He'd been waiting 20 years for that assignment.”

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He was able to take his family, rotating between a home in West Germany and the mission house in Potsdam, where the family had to be careful of their dinner conversation. “The servants were KGB; the chandelier was bugged,” daughter Mary Sydney Townsend said. “We knew they were listening to every word we said.”

Stiles also made sure his children saw “how other people lived and the experiences other people had,” Townsend said. She especially remembered her father taking them to see Anne Frank's refuge in the Netherlands and, accompanied by Soviets, visiting Buchenwald concentration camp.

After four years, the couple returned to San Antonio, where Stiles retired from the military in 1977. Their children were almost ready for high school and they had decided years earlier that that would be the time to return for good, his wife said.

Stiles then went to work for Merrill Lynch as a financial adviser. “He had a lot of mathematic sense,” Whitlock said. “He had a good business sense ... and helped many, many people invest their money wisely.”